3D printing dev’s free tool unlocks curved printing along all three axes
PancakeSlicer is a self-hostable non-planar 3D printing slicer that might finally make non-planar slicing more accessible to the masses.
Alpaca Engineering introduced his self-hostable non-planar slicer, PancakeSlicer, in a YouTube video. He explains that most non-planar 3D printing demonstrations are meant for research purposes with limited practical adoption by 3D printer owners. PancakeSlicer aims to make non-planar slicing as easy to implement as regular slicing workflows, even improving upon it with 3D printer management features.
Every few months, non-planar 3D printing demonstrations go viral, but rarely become widely adopted due to accessibility issues. PancakeSlicer addresses this by providing a familiar workflow for 3D printer owners, who are accustomed to running G-code directly from an SD card. Commercially available 3D printers are not optimized for non-planar printing, and the slicer uses 3D models of various print heads from different printer models to avoid collisions.
PancakeSlicer supports a large number of printers from Bambu Lab, Prusa, Creality, Voron, and others, but with various slicing capabilities. The slicer also offers self-hosting features, allowing users to access it through a web UI on a desktop, NAS, or home server. Users can send print jobs from any device and manage multiple printers with different profiles.
PancakeSlicer can manage two slice jobs simultaneously and replaces Bambu Studio and Bambu Connect in LAN-only mode. It is a significant step towards making non-planar slicing as accessible and user-friendly as modern 3D printing workflows.
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